I think I may have begun writing sonnets a few Buddhist lifetimes ago. At any rate, in this lifetime, like many other poets, I’ve found the form irresistible.

Here are four sonnets. The last three are offered as invitations:

​But the first is a traditional religious sonnet, a Petrarchan:

“Sea-faring Lord. . . .”

Sea-faring Lord—lord of the telescope,Sails and mast, the prow against the waves,The distant island and the ringent grave,Deck and hold, net, harpoon, and rope--Grip my clasped hands clinging to the mizzen-top,And with your storming make my sails concave;Heal the scourged back of the ocean-slave.You round my life. You are my Cape of Good Hope.And if my prayers to you are puny prayers,The miserable heap of secrets only you dispel,Send colors to my ears, and to my eyes obliqueGull calls of Hell. Lord, it is you who staresThrough the empty sockets of the turtle shellAnd winds my soul and body with your marlinspike.from This Shadowy Place (St. Augustine’s Press)​

The second is a result of years I’ve worked trying to create a new sonnet form. Since a sonnet is a “small song,” it actually doesn’t have to be the traditional 14 lines of a Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnet. Mine is 16 lines.

Dada spread his fingers on a cloud of nailsinching across the eyes of several touristscome to gawk at New York. Dada saidkeep your thoughts on how a train derailsand angels love tunnels. On Dada’s wrists,lips turned into mirrors and loaves of breadleaned from the doorways, raggletailsending their stories. Dada in the harbor mistnever wore a rainbow on his head.Say that for him. But Dada never stalkedslowly though a pine forest, or climbed the stairsover a sleeping dog, and when my prayersnudged his shoulder, Dada only chalkednarwhals on the backs of my kid gloves,elephants on stars. Still, still I lovedto pull his beard and follow his jaywalk.from Present Vanishing: Poems (Sarabande Books)

Note: I’d be tremendously pleased if others happened to like this rhyme scheme, and wrote some of their own sonnets using it. (For additional interest read down the first letters of the poem to find an egotistical acrostic.)​

The third type of sonnet is from a sequence I call a “Gerund Sonnet” or “Gerund Phrase Sonnet.” Jealous of the Japanese having their national haiku popular form, I’ve wanted to encourage an American form of the sonnet that’s very easy and even fun to write, requires no strict meter and only minimal rhyming.

It can use the basic Shakespearean or Petrarchan or Miltonic form (or other rhyme schemes for the sonnet) as well as slant rhyme (slant rhyme and off rhyme and enjambment and varying line meter greatly encouraged). In the Shakespearean version, the rhymes are minimal, just four, one each for each of the first three quatrains, followed by the couplet rhyme:

ABCB DEFE GHIH JJ

A Gerund Sonnet usually uses the rhetorical form of “Process Analysis.” It describes an action while keeping, hopefully, something other in mind.

Here are two examples, the first with a slight variation on the rhyme scheme, rhyming​ABCB DEFE GHIH JH

​so requiring only three rhymes:​

Raking in a Japanese Sand Garden

I’m not wearing a robeand my head’s not shaven,nor am I trying to solvesome impossible koan.

And it’s been monthssince I last meditatedor in a small tea ceremonypatiently waited.

Yet slowly, backing awayfrom one more life boulder,I become calm, raking around ita curving sand river

​Ultimately, I’m with those who would advocate an “American Sonnet.” This sonnet might also be akin to “American Zen,” which can be at once zany and serious.

To paraphrase the old sea shanty, the “American Sonnet” might be a sonnet with a belly that can be shaved with a rusty razor, put in a hold with the Captain’s daughter, tossed into the back of a paddy wagon and brought to jail.

To extend the metaphor, if the sonnet has both drunkenness (freedom; elements of free verse) and form (jail experience; Dylan Thomas: “Though I sang in my chains. . . .”), it may well be fit and fun to ship out onto our 21st Century seas, “Earl-eye in the morning,”